At Home on the Hill: To Stage or Not To Stage
This sponsored column is written by Ty Voyles, a licensed Realtor© in the District of Columbia and principal of Fulcrum Properties Group, a team of real estate agents located on Capitol Hill that serves Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Complete our Buyer Questionnaire or Sellers Questionnaire today, and we can help you find your dream home tomorrow!
There are three key things to selling a home: communication, price and marketing, and showings. Okay, there are a lot of other things, but most fall into those three buckets. And today, I want to talk about staging your home for marketing and showings.
At its most basic level, staging is the process of decluttering and rearranging your home to make it appeal to a broad array of potential buyers. Your home is beautiful. It is your life, your memories; it is the place where you have spent so much time with loved ones. But that doesn’t mean it will photograph and show well. And those photographs and walk-throughs can make a huge difference in how quickly your home will sell.
According to the National Association of Realtors, staged homes sell 80 percent quicker, and for up to 11 percent more money than non-staged properties. NAR also found that 81 percent of buyers report having an easier time visualizing a property as their future home if it is staged and that two-thirds of buyers were willing to overlook small faults in the property.
The biggest reason people opt to not stage their home is the fear of the cost. This is where I recommend that you look at all of your options. Let a stager come in to do a consultation, which is often free.
A good stager will take a look at your home with fresh eyes — just as will a potential home buyer. But unlike a buyer who will move onto another property, the staging specialist will be able to pinpoint what adjustments will be able to make the best impact.
Moving a piece or two of furniture, or even place a few pieces in storage, can go a long way to making your home feel that much more open. More importantly, it can help a potential buyer see how the home could be their home.
Staging packages run the full range of cost. A consultant can work with what you have, can focus on just one or two rooms, or can furnish and stage your entire home. Studies show that the rooms in which staging benefits marketing and showings the most are, in order: living room, kitchen and master bedroom. That’s right, you can just focus on one or two rooms, spending an amount that you are almost certain to make back in a sale with the right agent and marketing.
To get an idea of a before and after of a newly renovated home that was photographed empty, and photographed staged, click here. This staging was certainly on the higher end of the cost spectrum, but you can see how even a few pieces of furniture and visual accents made a big difference.
Are you interested in finding out whether or not staging, and what level of staging, would help your home sell faster? Or do you what to know what other advice we have for selling your property? Give us a call.
The views and opinions expressed in the column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Hill Now.
